I owned an Amiga 500 and loved it. It was a great computer and unfortunate Commodore wasn’t able to compete with IBM-PC or Apple. During the mid-80’s, Amiga was far ahead of its competitors.

While I don’t agree with all of Rozlog’s predictions. Prediction #7 - specialized or task oriented chips becomes standard on motherboards reminds me of the Amiga architecture. In addition to a main processor, the Amiga had three specialized chips to handle graphics (Denise), sound (Paula) and a chipset for routine operations (Agnus) - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Original_chipset).

“7. Specialized chips (task oriented) will become standard on mother boards in an effort to move green. We are starting to see this trend with Graphics chips, where the manufacturer will put a light-weight graphics chip on the mother board and for normal use (email, browsing the web, etc) the on board graphics chip will be utilized. Then when the user wants to use PhotoShop or play the latest Game on the market, the real graphics boards kick in and do the work. Thus, when in general use the machine takes up much fewer resources and then on-demand can increase the resource consumption to fit the task at hand. This approach will be applied to other various other areas of the PC.”

A couple of years ago, I blogged about an phenomenon called Bukimi no tani or Uncanny Valley. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror posted a blog expanding on Bill Higgins description of a User Interface anti-pattern. The anti-pattern is where users experience Uncanny Valley expecting a web application and instead are given a desktop application.

“A web app that apes the conventions of a desktop application is attempting to cross the uncanny valley of user interface design. This is a bad idea for all the same reasons; the tiny flaws and imperfections of the simulation will be grossly magnified for users.”

All too often, I’ve seen corporate line of business applications fail to cross the uncanny valley by simulating a desktop application using JavaScript, Async requests and HTML. Yes, I agree that AJAX frameworks have made things easier but they’ve not come close to jumping the uncanny valley.